5 Most important articles and books in AL
Communication in a discipline takes place mainly through books and jour-
nal articles. Themes develop through interactions in various forms of pub-
lication. We may assume that for each discipline there are publications that
are seen as core by a significant proportion of the researchers involved. In
this chapter, I want to look at the most important articles and books to see
what that core is for AL as a discipline.
The two questions in the questionnaire were formulated as follows:
“What are the 5–10 most important articles/book chapters for you over
these 30 years?”and“What are the 5–10 most important books for you over
these 30 years?”
Almost all informants complained that this is a very difficult task, and
several of them gave up on this, mentioning“too many to list”.
They also asked whether the publications should be the ones that were
important for themselves or for thefield as a whole. Interpretations dif-
fered; some informants clearly chose the publications that had been impor-
tant for them, others listed publications that defined thefield in their view.
Since there is no objective way tofind out what the informants had in
mind while listing publications, it was decided to pull all the publications
together.
Precision in referencing is not the most pronounced characteristic of my
informants. Many left articles underspecified with respect to volume or
pages, or even wrong information. For instance, Bley-Vroman’s article in
Language Learningwas mentioned four times, but each time with a different
year of publication (1981, 1982, 1983 and 1984). Similarly, the Firth and
Wagner article inThe Modern Language Journalwas reported as published in
a range of years.
5.1 Most important articles
The informants mentioned a staggering total of 424 articles with 111 dupli-
cates, leaving a total of 313 unique articles. Of these, 131 articles are men-
tioned only once. A total of 106 applied linguists listed only two articles 11
times and two nine times and the rest seven times or less. This is remarkable